Brian McDonald

Brian Keith McDonald (born February 18, 1965) is an American screenwriter, director, teacher and author, who lives in the state of Washington.

McDonald is best known for the books Invisible Ink, The Golden Theme and Ink Spots, and for the short film White Face.

Brian McDonald was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on February 18, 1965.

He was named after his mother's favorite actor, Brian Keith.

He has two younger brothers and a younger sister.

McDonald lived in Denver, Colorado until the age of seven.

After his parents divorced, he moved to Seattle, Washington with his mother.

One of his teachers suggested that he had a learning disability; McDonald learned that he was dyslexic when he was around twenty years old.

As a child, he used a cassette recorder to tape television shows, then watched them repeatedly "to see what made them tick."

McDonald made his first film, The War, which featured green plastic Army men in battle, when he was 10 years old.

McDonald started his first film-related job as a teenager around 1979, working for Bruce Walters at a company called Trickfilm in Seattle, making animated titles, motion graphics and effects for commercials.

When Walters took a job with Industrial Light and Magic in 1983, McDonald continued working with other Seattle-based animators until he was 21.

He interned for Alpha Cine labs, working for Bruce Vecchitto in the FX and title department, and for the Tennesson/Tobin Animation Studio.

In 1986, he moved from Seattle to Los Angeles.

His first job in L.A. was with Ted Rae on a movie called Night of the Creeps (1986), working as a runner who assisted in making the Creeps.

In 1988 he worked as a fabricator on Dead Heat, Return of the Living Dead Part II, and Night of the Demons. McDonald worked as an animator on The Resurrected, a 1992 horror film, and as a production assistant on Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

He also worked on other "creature" movies without gaining screen credits.

At the same time, he was writing speculative screenplays, comic books, and jokes for Ron Pearson, a comedian and old friend.

Shortly after, he started working casually as a comedian, doing his own material.

McDonald has described himself as "a mediocre stand-up," but credits the experience with teaching him "a ton about audiences and communication."

After seven years of struggling in L.A., juggling jobs in the film, comedy, and comic book writing fields, he returned to Seattle in 1993.

There he found work as a screenwriting instructor at the 911 Media Arts Center.

On the "near-demand of a student and the advice of a friend," McDonald wrote a book based on the classes he taught.

In 2001, McDonald directed a mockumentary short film called White Face.

It was shown at the 2001 Slamdance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Short.

He said he made the film as "a work sample," to "show off" his directing and writing skills.

It has since run on HBO and Cinemax, been used in corporations across the United States as a Diversity training tool, and is available on DVD.

McDonald has also directed several online advertisements for Visa Inc.

In 2001, Brian McDonald directed a mockumentary short film called White Face.

In 2002, he was a camera operator on Elixirs & Remedies, a music documentary.

Shortly after, he directed, and appears in, Flickering Memories, a documentary short about Seattle cinemas of the past, for the Seattle International Film Festival of 2004.

The film was incorrectly titled Flickering Images by the title-maker, though it is listed correctly by IMDb.

Completed in 2005, he called it Invisible Ink.

When he failed to find a publisher, he handed out copies of the manuscript to students and sent the manuscript to an old friend, Derek Thompson, a story artist at Pixar.

Andrew Stanton, who was working with Thompson, read McDonald's book in one sitting and later said it helped him with Wall-E.

He provided a blurb for the book and later suggested to the Pixar University staff that they allow McDonald to teach a class there.

Since 2006, McDonald has taught writing classes at Pixar, Disney and Industrial Light and Magic.

In 2010, the Libertary Company of Seattle (later known as Booktrope), published Invisible Ink and The Golden Theme.

In 2011, Booktrope Editions published Freeman – A Novella in Screenplay Form, and then Ink Spots, a compilation of posts on his The Invisible Ink blog from across a number of years, in 2012.

In the same year, McDonald started work with Tom Skerritt and the US Army, as part of the Red Badge program which encouraged US veterans to tell their stories.